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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25086376">Chanmi and the Random Loser</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starship_Captain_88/pseuds/Starship_Captain_88'>Starship_Captain_88</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Stories from The Server [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>AI, Computers, Cyberpunk, Detective, Gambling, Gen, No Incest, No Romance, No Sex, No Slash, No Smut, Spreadsheets, casino - Freeform, kuudere</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 04:34:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,202</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25086376</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starship_Captain_88/pseuds/Starship_Captain_88</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Chanmi is alone in the MPY Agency office when a mysterious client arrives.</p><p>He claims he has evidence of rigged games at the Great Casino.</p><p>Chanmi uses her cyberpunk skills to investigate.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Stories from The Server [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1755934</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Chanmi and the Random Loser</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>One Friday, Chanmi is left alone in the MPY Agency office when her detective colleagues go to the firing range with their shotguns.</p><p>A mysterious client arrives, claiming to have evidence that Saki-bot, the ruler of the Great Casino, biases the payouts.</p><p>Although she decides to take the case, her cyberpunk paranoia demands she start by investigating her new client.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>It was Friday, mid-morning. I was alone in the office. Janjan and Yancey had gone off together to practice with their shotguns at the range. They didn’t take me along because they said I’m too smol of a girl to handle a 12-gauge.</p><p>That annoyed me because it’s pretty sexist, as well as sizeist, but actually it’s true up to a point. I don’t like the bang and the bruise you get on your shoulder. I prefer my Glock 26. It may look like a toy but it’s a mean piece if you know how to use it. And I do. Even if I am smol.</p><p>Things would change when we found Ms Moon Potato. There would be 2 girls and 2 bois in the agency. Janjan had told me Moon was a demon with her shotgun, and sharp with her tongue if she ever felt my boss Yancey was getting too macho and impetuous.</p><p>Well, whatever, for now I was holding the fort alone.</p><p>It was quiet. The phones didn’t ring. There were no visitors. To while away the hours I played with my Sandbenders. Ever since Yancey told me that the Imperial House’s computers ran on a base-8 architecture, I had been obsessed with simulating it.</p><p>I was deep in the cyberscape when the doorbell rang. Reluctantly I paused the compiler, took off my VR rig, and looked to see who it might be.</p><p>The office door has a glass panel with the name on. I could see the gold lettering in reverse </p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-- YꟼM ƎHT --<br/>
-- ƎVITƆƎTƎꓷ ƎЯƎꓷUUꓘ --<br/>
--YƆИƎӘA --</p>
</div><p> and past that a looming shadow, which looked like a medium tall boi.</p><p>I sighed, and got up to let him in.</p><p>The visitor was a dark skinned boi with a short, curly haircut and a studied casual outfit; dark blue sports coat with rolled up sleeves over a white tee shirt. A chunky gold watch and a gold chain on the other wrist. Pale stone chinos, black tassel loafers. Retro, cool, and stylish. Cute, even. I approved.</p><p>I ushered him to the chair in front of my desk and offered refreshments. He accepted coffee from the already brewed pot, which made it easy.</p><p>“Here’s your coffee, sir.” I put out a plate of chocolate cookies too. I sat down and took a bite and a sip. Cyberspace is brain work. Chocolate is brain food.</p><p>I opened a notefile on my Sandbenders, activated the mike and piped the audio feed through a speech to text AI to transcribe the conversation. I added a timestamp, because you never know when it could be useful. I kept the raw audio too, of course.</p><p>“I am Chanmi, cyberpunk sidekick. How can I help you, sir?”</p><p>“My name’s Random “RIGGED™” Loser. I’m just an ordinary member. I don’t go on any special adventures, I mainly just get the .timely and gamble with it.”</p><p>“I see.”</p><p>“I mean I play <i>The Game</i>, of course, but I don’t do stuff like what I’ve read about you Kuudere detectives.”</p><p>“Everyone plays <i>The Game</i>, Mr Loser. No-one in the MPY is going to judge a member for just doing that and having a quiet life otherwise. But I guess something happened to make you want to come to see us.”</p><p>“You bet, Ms Chanmi, and it’s chonky! What it is, I’ve discovered that Saki-bot rigs the games in the Great Casino.”</p><p>“That’s a pretty major claim, sir. Do you have evidence?”</p><p>I put on a cool face, but in fact I knew my boss Yancey was very suspicious about Saki. There was a long, unhappy history between them. He had twice lost enough Coins to buy a Spaceship, on dubiously long strings of bad .betflips. That had hurt!</p><p>“You bet I do! I’ve tabulated my last 1,000 plays and the results. You just look at this and tell me there isn’t something screwy going on.”</p><p>He put a fat A5 hardback notebook on the table and pushed it towards me. I undid the elastic and took a look. It was neatly laid out, with hand ruled columns for date, time, game, stake, odds and result. Pages and pages of numbers. It had taken a lot of work to put this together. Random Loser might be a nut, but he was seriously organized.</p><p>“OK. I’ll have to scan this into my computer and analyze it, Mr Loser. That will take some time and it counts as investigative work. I can’t do all that without charging you.”</p><p>I had been pretty rigorously trained in how to bill clients. The boss said he and Moon started the agency to make money, to “bring justice for the members, <i>at 100 clams an hour plus expenses</i>.” I don’t totally believe that. Part of being Kuudere is you have a cool front which conceals your warm heart. I had seen Yancey do a lot of what you could call <i>pro bono</i> work.</p><p>Even so we’re not a charity, and there is a tariff. I gave Mr Loser the pamphlet which describes our services and fee structure.</p><p>“Please would you read this, before you decide if you want to take the investigation any further?”</p><p>He started to read. I used the time to think about the background to his claim. </p><p>There are bots and there are bots, from simple street cleaners up to sophisticated models like Lord Yuzu’s butler Michiko. Only the most advanced types have personalities and names.</p><p>Saki is one of the most senior bots in The Server. She rules the Great Casino, and she drops bags of Coins at random in the channels, for any member to pick up if they are quick enough. So far so innocent, though the tussles for the bags of Coins sometimes cause trouble.</p><p>The questions begin to pile up when you look at members high on the leaderboard, such as the Princess. She was bobbing between no.3 and no.4. Who is the Princess’s right-hand boi? The Frog Prince Yancy. The Princess is up there because Yancy gives her all the Coins he can earn or win. Yancy’s other Aspect is Yancey the hard-boiled detective. My boss.</p><p>There were rumours of an incident involving Saki and Yancey, long before I joined the agency.</p><p>The way I heard it, it happened the evening the Zombot Apocalypse ended. Saki vanished from her office at the Casino. The next morning Yancey lit out for IRL Tokyo with a smile and a <i>chomped hand</i>, and he didn’t come back for a good while. </p><p>There was an official investigation by the Mods but no-one ever heard the results. Which makes you wonder what happened to all the security cam footage from inside of the Casino. Then again, the Apocalypse was caused by a viral attack on The Server’s control systems, so maybe there wasn’t any footage.</p><p>At any rate, Mistress Kou had to restore Saki from back-up before the Casino could open again. But she hired Moon and Yancey to investigate the Head Patting Café shortly afterwards. She wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t trust them, so maybe it was all a big pile of nothing.</p><p>But it makes you think...</p><p>Random Loser finished reading the pamphlet.</p><p>“So, if I engage you to investigate my case, it’s 25 Coins an hour, plus expenses?”</p><p>“Yes. That’s just for me. It would be more for a senior detective.”</p><p>He thought about it for a minute.</p><p>“Look, Ms Chanmi, I haven’t got a lot of Coins right now, but don’t you agree, if I’m right, Saki owes me a ton?”</p><p>“Yes. If you’re right.”</p><p>“Okay. I know I’m right, so here’s my proposition. I’ll pay enough now for you to analyse my data. If you’re convinced by your results, let’s work together to get all my money back from Saki. Then I can pay you in full, and a good bonus.”</p><p>I thought about it. The day had felt slow, like nothing much was going to happen, until this Loser turned up. It was nearly lunchtime. The boss and Janjan had gone with a lot of ammo so they weren’t coming back soon.</p><p>“OK, Mr Loser. I’ll analyse your data and contact you later on with my results. We’ll talk more then.” </p><p>He filled in the contract form and gave me a bag of Coins. I pinged my contact details to his phone. He accepted my .cf file, which not by coincidence installed some subtle warez to give me a backdoor into his phone’s OS. It’s always good to have an edge.</p><p>I showed him out.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>* * * * *</p>
</div><p>It was lunchtime. I put my Sandbenders into my go bag and went to the diner on the corner. They know us well, because we eat there a lot and we give good tips. I got shown to a nice seat even though it was already busy. </p><p>I ordered the blue plate special. Today it was roast chicken, buttered carrots and boiled potatoes, with gravy. While I waited for my order I started to scan the pages of Random Loser’s notebook. Unfortunately this could only be done by hand. It was tedious but I got half of it done before my food arrived.</p><p>I thought about Loser while I was eating. A literally random boi by handle, he turns up and claims he’s discovered a fraud, says he’s got data, but anyone can fill up a notebook with stuff they’ve ginned up from nowhere. I had to suspect that Loser was a phoney, working a grift of some kind if he wasn’t just a nut.</p><p>But it’s a challenge, yeah? My skills against his. I scanned some of the rest of the pages with one hand while bolting my scran with the other. When I’d finished eating I had a double espresso macchiato. I finished the scanning just as the check arrived. </p><p>I set my AI to organise the data into a spreadsheet, which took longer than you would think because it was still trying to learn the Oxford English Dictionary even though I had throttled the API right down to try and make it concentrate on work. </p><p>I figured I might need a lot of spreadsheets to complete this case. I ought to have a word with the AI about its bad habits.</p><p>I went back to the office with a bag of ring donuts. The AI had laid out the data real neat. I started to look, and you know what? On the face of it there was something there.</p><p>A lot of members say it's all about the Likes, but for me it's all about the probabilities.</p><p>If you’ve read my previous cases you know I’m shit hot on Bayes theorem. Most people don’t know how to correctly calculate the probability of 2d6. If that’s you,  just think of Bayes as a kind of mathematical magic, which can generate new probabilities from linked factors. There’s a ton of stats functions too. It’s massively useful if you know what you’re doing, and if you can get enough data to work with.</p><p>What I needed was lots more gambling results, and I had several ideas how to get them. But before I tried for that, I wanted to confirm that the results Loser had given me were real. That’s where the backdoor into his smartphone came in. </p><p>Members usually go to the Casino and gamble in person. This is partly a safety cutout to reduce addiction -- on your phone you can only place small bets -- and it’s partly because a lot of the fun of gambling is being there, handling the chips, blowing on the dice, flipping the cards and Coins or whatever. So members dress up for an evening at the tables.</p><p>Anyway, the point is that members’ accounts are updated almost instantly after every bet, win or lose, although you might cash out your final balance hours later in physical Coins or digital Treats.</p><p>To put it simply, Loser’s phone held his gambling records and timestamped bank transfers, and if I could get into it, I could grab the data and correlate it against the paper records he gave me, and authenticate them. Unless he had seeded his phone with false data, of course.</p><p>Since Loser had accepted the ‘contact details’ packet I sent him, it was simple to dial silently into his phone, access the backdoor and get into the security system. I grabbed his betting and banking data, piped it into another spreadsheet and ran some comparison functions.</p><p>The two datasets matched, with reasonable allowance for the difference between the digital transfers in the Casino and the writing by hand in the notebook. There were a few slightly different timestamps, that was all. Maybe he wrote down the bet a minute or 2 after the transaction. It was good enough to satisfy me and my AI, anyway.</p><p>But hard-boiled Kuudere cyberpunk sidekicks are shielded by several layers of paranoia. Sure, I had validated Loser’s claim against his bank records. You can fake bank records. I needed to validate it against his physical presence in the Casino. To do that I had to tap a contact.</p><p>I picked up my phone and dialled Yan(dere).</p><p> </p><p>TO BE CONTINUED...</p><p>(C) 2020 Starship Captain 88</p>
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